1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to merge flag coding in video coding.
2. Description of the Related Art
Video compression, i.e., video coding, is an essential enabler for digital video products as it enables the storage and transmission of digital video. In general, video compression techniques apply prediction, transformation, quantization, and entropy coding to sequential blocks of pixels in a video sequence to compress, i.e., encode, the video sequence. Video decompression techniques generally perform the inverse of these operations in reverse order to decompress, i.e., decode, a compressed video sequence.
The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) of ITU-T WP3/16 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 is currently developing the next-generation video coding standard referred to as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). HEVC is expected to provide around 50% improvement in coding efficiency over the current standard, H.264/AVC, as well as larger resolutions and higher frame rates. Several coding efficiency enhancement tools are proposed in HEVC, among them a merge mode designed to reduce coding overhead by allowing a prediction unit (PU) to inherit motion vectors, prediction direction, and reference picture indices from selected neighboring PUs and a temporally co-located PU. While the merge mode as currently specified, i.e., as implemented in HEVC test model 2.0 (HM2.0), does reduce coding overhead, additional improvements are desirable.